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Tag Archives: tuner

Went to Belton, TX for the Ham Radio Expo held there twice a year. Big swapmeet and convention. Picked up a trunk-lip antenna mount for the car and a multiband antenna for HF — 80m through 2m. Cool thing about the antenna is that instead of using lossy traps to keep the antenna resonant for each band, it features jacks along the length so you can use the included jumper cable to manually select each band.

I took the new kit out yesterday for a test run, and unfortunately I’m not impressed. When connected to my antenna analyzer, the SWR on the antenna looks like it could go down to 1.25:1 after tweaking the length of the whip, but the moment I connect it to my radio and push 100W, the SWR gets so bad that my radio automatically backs off its power output to save itself. 40W is the limit, apparently.

My biggest suspicion is that the antenna mount isn’t fully grounded to the car frame. The frame is an essential part of the antenna system (it functions as the ground plane for the vertical antenna), and if it’s not properly connected, that RF energy goes back down the feedline and into the radio.

The mount has a rubber pad to protect the paint on the topside, and the clamp on the underside has four set-screws, an unpainted metal plate for protection, and that’s directly against the painted underside of the lip. What I need to do is take my roll of steel grounding strap and run that under the lip clamp, over to a bolt hole under the trunk decking, down to the trunk mount, and then underneath to the frame with some sort of lock washers and bolts to dig into the paint a little. Electrical conductivity is not the same as RF conductivity, and it’s for that reason that the ground strap is necessary.

If I still don’t get any better results, I’ll have to get an ATU (Automatic Tuner Unit) and put it electrically close to the antenna mount and run a line from that to the radio. Maybe even rewire the mount with a thicker cable. As long as the ATU can get a good tune, the radio won’t care and I might be able to run full power.

All antennas are compromise antennas. Too bad I can’t run a dipole on my car, eh? More news to follow.